Far ahead on points after skimming through the compulsory figures, honey-haired Tenley Albright, 19, stood poised and calm on Vienna’s open-air rink as the band swung into a lilting melody. Then, with all the confidence of a champion, long-legged Tenley glided out to begin her free skating—the difficult double loops and axels and double salchows of her own devising.
It was time for a lesser competitor to turn careful. In 1953 Tenley won the women’s world figure-skating championship, but last year when she started the free figures with the same confidence, a double flip dumped her flat on the ice.
She went home an also-ran. Last week the pretty premedical student from Radcliffe College seemed to dare the same accident to happen again. Flip she did—to perfection. She whirled through all her other maneuvers with the same precise skill. For the second time in three years Tenley Albright, who kept on skating despite an attack of polio in 1946, took the title to the U.S. In second place: New York’s Carol Heiss, 15.
In the men’s figure skating the U.S. did just as well. Colorado’s Hayes Alan Jenkins, 21, a devoted skater who spent so much time in the shadow of Harvard’s Dick Button that he was tempted to quit, leaped and spun to his third straight championship.
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